BABY DOLL: Blu-ray (Warner Bros./Newton Productions, 1956) Warner Archive

There are really only two ways to view Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956), either as a uniformly progressive cinema experiment, put forth by an imminent playwright and liberal-minded director to push along the permissible boundaries of screen censorship, or as a unvaryingly dreadful and repugnant exercise into the deeply sordid and perverse lives of a society in steep moral decline. Invariably, critics of the day found Tennessee Williams’ first stab at screenplay authorship a calculatingly trashy affair, marred by his inability to see humanity at large as anything better than vicious and despicable outcasts who, left to their own isolationism and accord, were likely to devolve and wallow in that primordial soup from whence mankind first began his ascent at the dawn of time. Indeed, the way back in this back of beyond setting for Baby Doll – a dilapidated mansion on a ravaged piece of sprawling nothingness near the Mississippi - photographed in B&W by Boris Kaufman with an uncompromising and stark clarity for that decline of civilization, decidedly left uncivilized and roiling in its own putridity, set a tone quite unlike anything else seen on the screen until that time. That the film’s stars, Carol Baker, Carl Malden and Eli Wallach were to be branded as denizens of dreck by the Catholic church upon the picture’s release, with Baker receiving the lion’s share of condemnation, to boil over into death threats, with her reputation and her career eviscerated by media pundits, served as a barometer of how well the homogenized and conservative measure of America ‘the beautiful’ still held, as a mainstay of the Eisenhower era.

Greek-born Elia Kazan was certainly no stranger to such controversy. Today, Kazan holds a hallowed place in cinema history as an influential force of nature to have matured the picture-making craft beyond its glamorous gala days. Sure – it’s easy to deify the dead. But in his time, Kazan was oft misjudged as the proverbial fly in the ointment – a disturber of the peace and dismantler of that Teflon-coated Hollywood iconography as the mecca of dreams. Kazan’s rebuttal to Hollywood began with his co-founding of the Actors Studio in 1947 and ‘the method’ – a principle to fly in the face of those glamazonian recreations dominating the West Coast. Kazan was often fond of suggesting his movies were invested in the personal plight of characters, pitted against a galvanized social structure determined to see them fail to rise above it. But actually, and in retrospect, Kazan’s verve for controversy seems more squarely situated on his desire to merely rock the boat for rocking the boat’s sake. Occasionally, his movies hit their mark as deeply felt entertainments, as with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) or East of Eden (1955). But more often than not, the results became strained, as in Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) or Pinky (1949), under the weight of Kazan’s glorified ‘message’, whose ‘teachable moments’ superseded their innate entertainment value. And then, there was Kazan’s infamous 1952 run-in with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Kazan’s ‘naming of names’ proved near fatal to his career. Most definitely, it ostracized him from many in the Hollywood community. Indeed, it is difficult to have any respect for Kazan’s caving in under political pressure as anything better than an all-out betrayal of the creative community to have fostered and embraced his talents. And while Kazan held tight to the view he had chosen “only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were, either way, painful and wrong” the pall of his decision lingered well beyond when, in 1999, his honorary Oscar was met with a frosty reception by a delegation of his peers and a picket of more than 250 demonstrators outside the Dorothy Chandler pavilion.

Baby Doll was likely viewed by many in its time as little more than a perverted gesture by a fallen artist, railing against a world in which he seemingly had no place. Certainly, the characters who populate its drama are, at best, isolated, vengeful and distorted by their sexual proclivities. The girl, Baby Doll Meighan (Carroll Baker) is an under-age minx, who recognizes the power of her youthful sexuality, and exploits it as a wily tease to drive the two men in her life to wild distraction. The men, husband, Archie (Karl Malden) and Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach in his first movie) are disgustingly oversexed in their desire to possess and sexually ravage this ‘child’. Lest we forget, Baby Doll lacks the precise wherewithal to navigate through this dangerous game, spinning wildly out of her control. At its core, Baby Doll is decidedly a breakthrough for Kazan, who marks one of the most bone-chilling exposé into moral turpitude and uninhibited ignorance in movie history. The foul machinations of the plot are tempered, only slightly, by Kazan’s ability to find pockets of sick humor in Williams’ prose and level these against his otherwise uncannily perverse interpretations into this bizarre male/female partnership. What really sells Baby Doll is its performances. Baker, Malden and Wallach all fervently believed in the material and their devotion to it yields some of the finest examples of their high-functioning craft in their respective bodies of work. There is, however, a very fine line between this eccentric raciness and its otherwise nearly 2-hour descend into anarchy, one crossed several times in Kazan’s systematically obnoxious and odious screen fare.

To claim Baby Doll as a classic is therefore not altogether accurate, as the assault on our senses proves too invigorating and ugly to be celebrated merely as a testament to fine art – progressively mounted or otherwise.  To be sure, it’s a solid movie – prematurely, to have been yanked from distribution after Warner Bros. incurred some very sternly mounted backlash from the Catholic archdiocese. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to desire a re-visitation upon these characters into our living rooms once they have spewed their riveting wretchedness across our screens. Dark comedy aside, the picture still teems with a tawdriness that makes for an uncomfortable viewing; a little bit like suggesting pornography is to be studied for the way ‘action scenes’ ought to be lit. Tough argument, indeed. Baby Doll is often cited as an original effort from Tennessee Williams. But actually, it was loosely based on his own one-act play, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. The plot is focused on a rivalry between two cotton mill owners, one committing arson against the other’s gin. As revenge, the aggreged seduces the child bride of his rival in the hopes to solicit a confession of the other man’s complicity in the fire.

As Archie Lee Meighan (Malden) has taken to wife a child, in accordance with the promise he made to Baby Doll’s late father, he must delay his own sexual gratification until the girl’s 20^th birthday. So, Baby Doll sleeps in a curiously ornate crib while Archie remains in his own bed in an adjacent room. To gratify his sexual urges, Archie has poked a hole through the wall that separates so he can spy on Baby Doll while she sleeps, a curiosity not lost on the girl’s otherwise senile, Aunt Rose Comfort (Mildred Dunnock) who also lives with the couple. As Archie has had to default on payments to the furniture-leasing company, every last stitch of home furnishing is repossessed. Having misperceived her future with this man much too old for her, Baby Doll now threatens to leave Archie, whose gin is failing. Jealous of his competitor, Silva Vacarro, who owns a modernized cotton gin, Archie torches Vacarro’s facility under the cover of night. Suspecting Archie of the crime, Vacarro lays a trap, arriving at Archie’s farm with truckloads of cotton, imploring Archie to gin it for him. Greedily, Archie agrees, leaving Baby Doll in Vacarro’s care for the afternoon. Vacarro wastes no time making his truer intensions known. Baby Doll is, at first insulted, and tries to get Archie to see to reason. Instead, he slaps her in the face. She returns to Vacarro, who comforts her tenderly. Vacarro then forces Baby Doll to sign an affidavit admitting Archie’s guilt.

Afterward, Vacarro stays for dinner, awaiting Archie’s return from the gin. Insanely jealous of his wife’s curiosity in this stranger, Archie orders Aunt Rose to pack her things and move out of his house. In reply, Vacarro makes a generous offer – to have Rose move in with him as his cook. He also offers Baby Doll a means of escape from her husband.  But when Vacarro confronts Archie with Baby’s Doll’s sworn affidavit, Archie retrieves his shotgun and pursues Vacarro out in the storm while Baby Doll frantically telephones for the police. Archie is eventually arrested after Vacarro presents the officers arriving on the scene with his affidavit. As he is being taken away, Archie suddenly realizes today is Baby Doll’s birthday. Alas, he will not be partaking of that anniversary, and, more bitterly than ever, he suddenly realizes his arch nemesis will likely being doing those honors, as Vacarro has already promised to return later in the day with more cotton. As Archie is taken away, Aunt Rose comforts Baby Doll. The two women retire indoors to await Vacarro’s return.

Baby Doll packs a wallop, chiefly due to Tennessee William’s incredible and peerless ability to write lengthy speeches and diatribes that, at least on paper, must have been daunting for the actors to memorize, though nevertheless, and, on the screen, appear effortlessly to have been spoken off the cuff by their embittered alter egos. At Kazan’s insistence, the picture was shot almost entirely in Mississippi, adding an air of authenticity incalculably to augment the sweaty strain and atmospheric air of impending doom in Williams prose, and, soon to encroach upon these fictional lives with devastating consequences. Despite the effort to ban the picture, the Roman Catholic National Legion of Decency was only partly successful at killing off interest. Indeed, Baby Doll earned Kazan the Golden Globe for Best Director – just one of four nominations, later to be matched respectively by AMPAS and BAFTA. Culturally, the movie gets the nod for introducing the ‘baby doll’ nightgown, created by costume designer, Anna Hill Johnstone. Despite the presence of Karl Malden and Eli Wallach, neither to have ever cut the mustard as ‘leading man’ material during Hollywood’s golden age, the picture is owned by Carol Baker’s saucy performance as the titular heroine of the piece. Williams, who had envisioned Marilyn Monroe for the title role, was later moved to accept Baker in her stead after watching Baker nail an unrelated scene at the Actors Studio.  

At the outset of production, Benoit, Mississippi residents in the still heavily segregated South were highly skeptical of these Hollywood ‘show folk’, perhaps fearful Kazan had come to make a movie about segregation, or worse, merely to present them as silly simpletons and grotesque caricatures. It took the presence of Tennessee Williams, much revered in the deep South, to offset these concerns and allow the production to shoot smoothly over 3 months.  Much of Baby Doll was shot in J.C. Burrus house, a still-standing antebellum manor built in 1848 in Bolivar County. And if the picture’s opening weekend gross - $51,232, and subsequent $2.3 million U.S. box office palled to Kazan and the studio’s initial expectations for a heavy rain-maker, Kazan could at least find comfort in the fact he had not compromised his own film-maker’s principles to bring it to the screen. Even as Cardinal Francis Spellman, Archbishop of New York, decried the results, Baby Doll would emerge and remain as one of the most unprecedentedly cynical and dark movies ever distributed by a major Hollywood studio.  Today, the fuss regarding Baby Doll’s lewdness – largely implied – has subsided, with Sweden’s all-out ban and Time Magazine’s declaration of it as being “…possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture…legally exhibited” seemingly quaint reminders of a wrinkle in time when all romantic longing on the screen had to be reduced to a chaste – and well-timed - peck on the lips, and even married couples still slept in two beds.  

Baby Doll’s arrival on Blu-ray via the Warner Archive is welcomed. The results, alas, appear just a tad underwhelming. Ideally, Boris Kaufman’s B&W cinematography was never meant to exhibit the uber-gloss of a mainstream Hollywood production. So, we get lots of earthy and half-lit moments where the soft glint of noonday sun filtering through the trees creates a misty/musty appeal all its own.  Nevertheless, contrast seems slightly anemic, with many outdoor scenes lacking any genuinely saturated black levels. Instead, everything falls into a mid-register of tonal gray. Is this as was originally intended by Kaufman? Not sure. It does, however, give these scenes a sort of generic ‘washed out’ look I found a tad off-putting. The indoor scenes, shot under more controlled lighting conditions, fare better. The other lack is ‘fine detail’.  Much of the image looks less refined than anticipated. Fine details in skin and hair are only visible in close-ups. Film grain, robust throughout, looks indigenous to its source. But if I had to speculate, I would almost venture that a tad of DNR has been applied around the edges, to soften the image somewhat. Age-related artifacts have been thoroughly eradicated – a definite plus. The 2.0 DTS mono is clear and clean throughout. The only extra is a short featurette ‘See No Evil’ included on Warner’s long-since retired DVD release from 2002, plus an original theatrical trailer, to have seen better days. Bottom line: Baby Doll is an interesting movie, but one that does not necessarily make it a candidate for repeat viewing. The Blu-ray is good, but strangely, not what I expected. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

1